In this card, NVIDIA used the 256Mbit Samsung K4J55323QF DDR3 memory chips

But a check of Samsung&#39;s website revealed that the memory chips were rated for a clock speed of 700MHz. Therefore, they provide the NV40 with a whopping memory bandwidth of 44.8GB/s&#33; Wow&#33;

NV40 soundly trashed both ATI and NVIDIA&#39;s former flagship cards. Believe it or not, it is MORE THAN TWICE as fast as either card&#33; The R420 better be good or else

Conclusion

What can I say? The NV40 totally blew me off&#33; Although we did not have much time to really test it, the few benchmarks we ran certainly tells us a lot&#33;

ATI looks like it is in for a big surprise. NVIDIA has apparently learned from the mistakes made in the NV30/35 core and made the NV40 everything that we hoped it would be.

Across the board, the NV40 appears to be 40-100% faster than both the GeForce FX 5950 and Radeon 9800XT. Now, isn&#39;t that something?

What&#39;s more, our source tells that the beta driver is still not perfect. If his/her hints are anything to go by, we should see much greater performance from the NV40 once the driver is fully optimized.

There will be two versions of ATI&#39;s new chip. One based on DDR1 and one based on the DDR2 variation, also known as GDDR 3. The DDR1 boards have been codenamed Skateboard while the second R420 boards will get the more prestigious Olympic Snowboard codename.

All R420 based cards will be AGP 8X and VGA, DVI and VIVO ready and will support DirectX 9.0c meaning that they will be pixel shader 3.0 ready.

The high end boards will carry the XT mark, not a great surprise there, and will run at 500MHz for the GPU and at about 1000MHz for the memory. They will carry 256 MB of memory (8x32) with a 256-bit bus.

Originally posted by adamp2p@1 April 2004 - 22:13 I don&#39;t know but one thing is for sure:

LOL , dunno abt fanboys ....but the more these companies try to outrun the others product the better for all of us &#33;&#33;

however Nvidia might snatch the gfx crown frm ATi cuz they have a better product on their hands as of now &#33;&#33; This is based on paper facts and not real world tests.

&nbsp; Nvidia has unofficially confirmed some hardware specs of its upcoming NV40 chip and it is quite possible that the winner of the next round of the graphics war may have already been decided.
According to the company, its new chip will feature a full 16 pipelines, not the 8x2 set-up which had been expected. This change means that Nvidia&#39;s new GPU will have a staggering 205-210 million transistors and not the expected 175 million.

It seems that ATI&#39;s inexperience at this game may have gotten the best of them since they had been eager to claim that their R420 would beat Nvidia in, at least, 10 common games. These claims however, were made based on Nvidia using the predicted 175 million transistors, information which ATI had and was obviously flawed.

Recent gossip from the Intel Developer Forum did claim that Nvidia had an ace up their sleeve and it would appear that it has slipped it out. The timing of the announcement was careful so ATI could not respond with a change in hardware, even though the NV40 has slipped by a month.

This latest news adds another exciting chapter in the epic battle between the two companies and no one is foolish enough to write ATI off quite yet. The Canadian firm has so far proved that it can match its rival move for move.

According to the inquirer.net, the new core will enable cards to run four times faster in Doom 3 and seven times faster in Half Life 2 then its current fastest product. In order to back-up such extravagant claims the company indicates that the NV40 will support the shader models 3.0 that it claims are in DirectX 9.0c and that the new chip will have three times the performance and eight times faster shaders than the NV35. If any of this is even remotely close to the cards actual performance then the graphics speed crown will really be up for grabs this time round.

The NV40 is expected to run at between 450 and 550 MHz with the faster versions gaining the coveted U or Ultra marking while the memory will be GDDR 2 or 3. NVidia has also been working on keeping the noise levels down on the new boards, so expect an improvement there too.

I don&#39;t think the guy writing that is sure of what people mean when something is "slated for a 12th of May release for example."

Right now, it looks like the NVIDIA NV40 will be the first to hit the market. NVIDIA is slated to launch the NV40 in a huge launch cum LAN party in San Francisco on the 13th of April. Just 12 days away&#33;

EDIT: Just reading the article, its a little lucky this all happened, AND its April 1st.

This thread at Beyond3D discusses the leaked presentation concerning the R420, complete with presenter&#39;s notes&#33; It was inadvertantly (?) released on the ATi website for a small time a few days ago, but soon taken down. One of the more interesting comments:

Steer people away from flow control in ps3.0 because we expect it to hurt badly. (Also itís the main extra feature on NV40 vs R420 so letís discourage people from using it until R5xx shows up with decent performance...)

Looks like no PS3 on the R420 then.

I can&#39;t afford them really either, but I think I&#39;m gonna get an NV40 (apparently called the Geforce 6800) when it&#39;s out. Am I hoping too much for a sub £200 price for the non ultra?